Islamic Apologism: The Cultural 

Imperialism of the

Radical Left

 

Sent by: Anonymous Anarchist 4-4-2013

The recent events over the “topless jihad” protests in the Middle East received very little consideration by the radical left. In almost every case where serious violations of human rights caused by Muslim fundamentalists or theocratic non-Western regimes, the radical left tends to adopt a mild stance, by avoiding to criticize the disastrous effects of religious fanaticism. The main issue here is how many leftists supporters reject this apologetic stance for Islam, viewing this religion (and every other religion for that matter) through the same lens as they view the post-enlightenment western Christianity that they were exposed to within their own culture. In other words, they make broad generalizations when dealing with “religion” and assume that all major world religions preach exactly the same thing in terms of rituals, values, human relationships, authorities or hierarchies, politics, economics, the dichotomy between the individual and the collective, and so on.

First of all, it needs to be pointed out that the Quran is not like the Bible. While many Christians do not take every single word of the Bible as a literal truth (though many fundamentalists do), the Quran is to be taken literally, as it is allegedly the direct, undisputed word of God. Second of all, Islam is overtly political. To make a comparison, for the first few hundred years of Christianity (however authoritarian Christianity may be in its own right), Christians appear to act outside the political sphere, with the exception of Greece and Russia where Christian religious bureaucracies still play a significant role in the public opinion, penetrating political decisions and their practical implementations. In contrast, for most of its existence as an established faith, Islam has been an almost totalitarian socio-political system. Religiously speaking, Muhammad was both king and Pope in his own right, exercising unlimited patriarchal rights par excellence. Politics and religion in the case of Islam are deeply integrated and interconnected. This isn’t to say that politics and religion in an Islamic-dominated society cannot be separated at any degree (the amount of secular Muslims is on the rise, while there have been many attempts to reject absolutism during the 20th century in the Arab and greater Muslim World), but rather that the role Islam plays in the political realm is very different – both historically and in the present – than the Christianity most westerners are used to. To claim that Islam is not political, or only political in a certain framework, does not force women to become unquestionably and brutally subordinated to their husbands, is not just wrong but also ahistorical, unless one is referring to a secularized, modernized sect, which either attempts to rationalize Islamic ethics or even adopts a less religious-centric approach, by embracing other values and norms. However, such examples are clearly not representative of the organized Orthodox Islam that’s practiced and preached by the majority of Muslims today.

What many of the leftists who act as apologists for Islam insist on is that the authoritarian and patriarchal aspects of Muslim fundamentalists (or any organized religion for that matter) are not the “real Islam”, because the “real Islam” is the version that preaches values consistent with those of western radical leftists. Of course, they provide no evidence for this; after all, most of these leftists do not come from Muslim backgrounds or cultures themselves, and, hence, they know very little of the Islamic religion (in most cases they have only been in contact through secondary source materials). Though within this apologism, western leftists project the following justification: “this is what a religion ought to be”, namely, that Islam needs to be divorced from its authoritarian traditions and teachings regardless if the majority of the world’s Muslims will accept it that way. And of course, western leftists have the privilege of deciding what a religion ought to be, as they (allegedly) know what is best. They have the opportunity to decide what is and isn’t the “real Islam” – or in other cases, the “real [insert organized religion or ideology here]” – because they hold so much more intellect than everyone else. In a true showing of elitism they breed there own form of cultural imperialism by throwing non-western cultures into a western context in order to make them seem more approachable or likable to “the west”. To use another example, take the notion of “primitive communism”: many indigenous cultures were not communist in the sense that they didn’t live in stateless, classless societies which held all things in common. Many of them had governing hierarchies, forms of exchange similar to markets, inequality between the sexes, and so on. However, the misled notion continues to inspire leftist radicals who dream of “going back” to a more egalitarian past, without any realization of how those indigenous societies actually functioned. The same is true in this case: Islam is undoubtedly patriarchal, and strictly anti-communist or anti-feminist, yet the leftists turn a blind eye on it and try to shave away these aspects in order to make it consistent with their values, regardless of what the religion truly teaches and what history shows. The goal is obviously to project their own paradigms on this absolutist religion, either out of ignorance or out of some political agenda.

Speaking from a pragmatic point-of-view, radical leftists are shooting themselves in the foot whenever they decide to become allies with religious fundamentalists, only because these groups denounce an existing undeniable inequity: the malefactions of western expansionism and globalization. In Iran, radical leftist dissidents are frequently targeted by the Islamic theocracy. During the 1979 coup’ d’ etat in Iran, many Marxists, anarchists, and western-style intellectuals took part; when the Islamic theocrats took power, some of the first people they imprisoned, expelled, or executed were these same Marxists, anarchists, sexual minorities and western-style intellectuals who fought alongside them. Likewise, anarchists in Syria and Egypt remain targeted by the Islamist factions brewing in both states. It should be understood very well that extremist Islamic groups are not calling for workers’ self-management or freedom from governing authority: they are calling for a religious dictatorial state and a social order based entirely on metaphysical doctrine.

It is obvious that the radical left is massively fetishized with the anti-imperialist imaginary. Any critique against the theocratic regimes of Middle East is automatically translated like “an apology of western colonial culture.” When recently Israel attacked Palestine killing hundreds of civilians, Hamas authorities did not hesitate to practice similar brutal policies against every ‘suspect’ of Mossad collaboration, against any potential political threat. The left has been solely restricted to condemning the Israeli foreign policy. There is no doubt regarding Israel’s brutalities in this area, neither about the atrocities committed by the American army in the occupied territories. These crimes have to be rejected in the consciousness of the majority, and the fact that there are still individuals who passionately embrace western militarism clearly reveals the anthropological decay of our times, the inability of a society to become truly independent from its nationalistic imperialist deliriums. However, closing our eyes to the Islamic fundamentalist voices, to the brutalities coming from Hamas and embracing anti-Jewish rambling, deprives us of our purposes for a radical social transformation. The Machiavellian logic of “the enemy of the enemy is my friend” has totally disorientated the leftists from their objectives: the enfranchisement of human beings from every oppressor.

Organized religion remains a tool of social control, and in order to form a free society we must break ourselves from its strongholds as well. We must cease seeing the world as a battlefield between two opposite sides that both express a similar amount of fanaticism, intolerance and racism. We, undoubtedly, have to acknowledge that Muslim people in the West are a particularly vulnerable social group, targeted by the media systematically and scapegoated by the entire right-wing press. Nonetheless, the level of sympathy we need to show with the Others – individuals of any faith – who face direct or indirect discrimination should not exceed the admissible A-level which allows us to recognize that exploitation (of any kind) and injustice can also occur within a minority. We cannot whitewash authoritarian religious teachings or shove the religions and cultures of others into our own frames. After all, wasn’t Karl Marx who said “religion is the opium of the masses”?